NYU Data Science newsletter – February 24, 2016

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This technical report records and discusses the Second Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE2). The report includes a description of the alternative, experimental submission and review process, two workshop keynote presentations, a series of lightning talks, a discussion on sustainability, and five discussions from the topic areas of exploring sustainability; software development experiences; credit & incentives; reproducibility & reuse & sharing; and code testing & code review. For each topic, the report includes a list of tangible actions that were proposed and that would lead to potential change. The workshop recognized that reliance on scientific software is pervasive in all areas of world-leading research today. The workshop participants then proceeded to explore different perspectives on the concept of sustainability. Key enablers and barriers of sustainable scientific software were identified from their experiences. In addition, recommendations with new requirements such as software credit files and software prize frameworks were outlined for improving practices in sustainable software engineering. There was also broad consensus that formal training in software development or engineering was rare among the practitioners. Significant strides need to be made in building a sense of community via training in software and technical practices, on increasing their size and scope, and on better integrating them directly into graduate education programs. Finally, journals can define and publish policies to improve reproducibility, whereas reviewers can insist that authors provide sufficient information and access to data and software to allow them reproduce the results in the paper. Hence a list of criteria is compiled for journals to provide to reviewers so as to make it easier to review software submitted for publication as a “Software Paper.”

… Twitter, you see, offers a wide range of tools for developers collectively known as Fabric. The new Fabric mobile app lets coders to keep a close eye on the health of their own smartphone apps or Internet services. It’s basically an extension of an existing tool called Crashlytics, a way of identifying the cause of app crashes and otherwise monitoring app performance that’s used by tens of thousands of coders.

“We built this for the obsessive startup CEO who obsessively checks up on how his app is doing,” says Twitter product manager Meekal Bajaj.

Why does Twitter offer a wide range of tools for developers building all sorts of apps outside the Twitter universe? Well, Twitter wants those apps inside the Twitter universe.

In a study powered by the labor of medical students, my colleagues and I found that two-thirds of clinical trials led by scientists at our finest academic institutions didn’t share their results publicly within two years of the study’s completion.

Moreover, none of these research institutions has a good record of sharing results. Many are much worse than the average.

At AAAI-16, a panel of experts in fields ranging from economics to computer science to philosophy explored how automation will shift the way we need to think about employment.

… where do innovators come from? And how do they acquire their skills?

One place – perhaps among the best – is college. Over the past seven years, my research has explored the influence of college on preparing students with the capacity, desire and intention to innovate.

In this time we’ve learned that many academic and social experiences matter quite a bit; grades, however, do not matter as much.

I’m a longtime fan of the Montreal Canadiens. I still remember their last Stanley Cup championship in 1993. I was just a kid back then, but I still have vivid memories of goalie Patrick Roy winking at the Los Angeles Kings’ Tomas Sandstrom after making an impressive save!

However, the Habs — as the Canadiens are affectionately known — have not been doing so great this year. In fact, they have lost so many games that Head Coach Michel Therrien’s job might very well be in jeopardy. This got me thinking: Does firing a coach during the season actually help a team improve their record? I decided to find out for myself.

A team of computer scientists and electrical engineers from the University of Washington has developed an extremely power-efficient version of Wi-Fi wireless networking technology that consumes 10,000 times less power than the current Wi-Fi components, allowing Wi-Fi networking to be built into a much wider range of devices. The team will present a paper (PDF) with the results of their research into what they have dubbed Passive Wi-Fi at the upcoming USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation in March.

University of Washington professor and MacArthur Fellow Shwetak Patel is featured in the new documentary, “The Human Face of Big Data.” … “The Human Face of Big Data,” airing 10 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 24, on PBS member stations (including Seattle’s KCTS), intentionally focuses first on data’s positive aspects. When the film opens with the statement that every object on Earth will be generating data at some point soon, the point is to make us think about the global good Big Data offers and how our access to the “super-visible” world that information has revealed, can improve our lives.

Which of today’s emerging technologies have a chance at solving a big problem and opening up new opportunities? Here are our picks. The 10 on this list all had an impressive milestone in the past year or are on the verge of one. These are technologies you need to know about right now.

We are seeking organizers for the 11th Workshop for Women in Machine Learning (WiML). The workshop will once again be co-located with the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference and will be held in December 2016 in Barcelona, Spain.

Deadline to respond is Monday, February 29.

For the first time, the annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) takes place in Germany. ACL 2016 will be held at the Humboldt University, in the heart of Berlin, August 7-12, 2016.

As in previous years, the program of the conference includes poster sessions, tutorials, workshops, and demonstrations in addition to the main conference. ACL is the premier conference of the field of computational linguistics, covering a broad spectrum of diverse research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

Deadline for long-paper submissions is Friday, March 18.

Today we are excited to announce the official 1.0 release of Vega-Lite, a high-level format for rapidly creating visualizations for analysis and presentation. With Vega-Lite, one can concisely describe a visualization as a set of encodings that map from data fields to the properties of graphical marks, using a JSON format. Vega-Lite also supports data transformations such as aggregation, binning, filtering, and sorting, along with visual transformations including stacked layouts and faceting into small multiples.